Breaking the Silence

            Despite a disappointment at the end of the week, last week is easily a contender for “Best Week of My Service.” Starting last Sunday, everything just seemed to be going right, I had a great time at a student’s family’s farm, I had some good and productive meetings with counterparts, another great lunch at the Khenifra volunteers’ host family, two great classes with my sophomores, where they wrote their own English plays, a great discussion with my juniors, all the other classes running very smoothly, and weather finally getting warm and sunny enough to spend a lot of time playing Frisbee with various age groups in the park. The capstone to the week was going to be two events on Friday and Saturday, one for boys and one for girls, where we would show the film Breaking the Silence: Moroccans Speak Out about Sexual Harassment.

            I hinted that we were planning this activity a couple of posts ago, but now I’ll go more in depth. Breaking the Silence is a documentary produced by Girls Global Media (an NGO you can read about here). In it a group of young and older women, young men, the former Minister of Women, and various others talk about their experiences with sexual harassment and an exploration of the issue in Morocco. You can watch it with English subtitles here. To prepare for the activity I found four counterparts (my mudir, one of my former CLIMB counterparts, a popular local teacher, and one of the workers at the Girls’ Dormitory), who all watched the documentary, and then we prepared some activities and discussions to follow up the showing. To me this was an extremely interesting part. The two male counterparts hadn’t heard these kinds of stories before because it is often very hard for women and men to talk about these topics together here. The two women, both of whom I’ve known for a long time, talked a little about their own experiences with harassment. We decided to divide the two events because we worried that the girls wouldn’t want to discuss things as openly with boys around, even the male counterparts and I wouldn’t be present for their event (and vice versa for the boys).

            On Friday, the day of the girls’ event, we had a major setback, when both my female counterparts became indisposed. We had around 70 girls show up, and it was really disheartening for me to have to tell them we needed to reschedule. However, we’d already planned an extra day for girls who couldn’t make Friday on the following Tuesday, and most of the girls said they would come to that instead. On Saturday we had the boys’ event, which faced its own problems when the ministry closed down the Dar Chabab for repairs over the objections of my mudir and me (why they couldn’t wait three days is still beyond me, especially since they’ve been talking about these repairs for the last year). Despite the inconvenience we were able to move the event at the last minute, and about 15 boys and young men showed up.

            Watching the discussion was fascinating. My counterparts conducted it entirely in Arabic, and at times it got very heated, so I wasn’t able to follow everything. Many of the boys came in at first on the defensive; there was a troubling amount of talk about how girls should watch what they wear. However, a few of the boys disagreed, and after an impassioned speech by my mudir (who has one teenaged daughter, one almost teenaged daughter, and a third much younger daughter) many of the boys changed their tune. One even made the important point that they (the boys) would probably find it incredibly frustrating if they couldn’t wear tight shirts or shorts without comment. Empathy is a wonderful thing. The boys were also very interested in finding where the line is between flirting and sexual harassment. One tried out the theory that many things are harassment if directed towards people you don’t know, but are fine with friends. While that is true to a point, the boys saw its weakness when my counterpart said, “Ted is my friend,” and then grabbed at my knee. “He didn’t want me to do that. Harassment.” Funny, and they got the important point. Some complained that we hadn’t done the events together, it is important that the sexes talk together about this. While we all agreed, we explained to them that we’d separated the events to make sure the girls felt comfortable the first time broaching this topic, and most of them seemed to understand that. We talked about the causes of sexual harassment, how many boys do it more out of boredom than anything else, and ways to confront that. They also talked for a while about differing moral and cultural norms regarding sexual freedom in the West and Islamic countries, which of course led to talk about differing interpretations of Islam and someone can still be Muslim by their own definition even if they are not in someone else’s. In the end, I think the boys found this a very important discussion. Many thanked us for showing the video afterwards, and want us to do follow up work, and say they’ll encourage their friends to come to future showings of the video.

            So, this was a very good week where I got to feel like I was doing some important work. Looking forward to the girls’ activity this week, and to working with these counterparts to talk more with the kids about gender issues in our town!

Students on the March

            Last week, a series of student protests across the country nudged Morocco. The impetus for these protests was a new online grading system from the Ministry of Education. In this system, as I understood it, teachers will enter test grades directly into the program, which will then compile student grades. Many students (and, indeed, many teachers) were bothered that this leaves no place for intangibles like student participation and behavior. Additionally, since this service was online and accessed by password many students were worried that their parents would have access to their grades.

            You’ll notice there were two extremely dissimilar elements to the protest against this online system. On the one hand, there were students arguing that their grade should be based on more than just a flawed testing system, on the other, there were students arguing that parents shouldn’t have access to their students’ grades. This, of course, widened the popularity of the protest, as both slackers and high achievers had something to complain about. Actually, having talked with some other volunteers about the protests in their towns, I found that different protests emphasized different things. I didn’t hear too much complaining about parental access (admittedly the kids I talked to are my regular students, all of whom are obviously taking extra English hours with me, so they are high achievers who probably don’t have too much to hide), but heard a lot about the terrible new grading system, but other groups apparently had different emphases. One volunteer said so far as her town was concerned it was a protest of slackers. They actually didn’t want to see participation and behavior added back in! In my town I did see a number of the slackers participating, but I also saw many of the hardest working kids.

            Many places also added additional complaints to the general protest. This is where I thought my kids made their strongest appeals. My kids wanted to see the leaky roofs to their classrooms fixed. They wanted to see the bathroom at their school repaired. They wanted more and better trained teachers hired. They wanted attendance to be made mandatory so that richer students couldn’t just study with private tutors then come in and ace tests (I didn’t know that was a thing until they told me about it). They also waxed a little into conspiracy theory territory; one group said they feared that hackers would break into the website and change grades.

            Although they didn’t attend school for most of the week, from what I saw students kept peaceful and organized. My regulars still kept coming to my classes, so they didn’t make it a holiday. One of the days they tried to march to the provincial capitol, but were escorted back by the gendarmerie a few miles out of town. A different day (the first) I was in the Khenifra on a failed attempt to visit the local offices of the Education Ministry. Although there was a huge crowd of protesters outside the office they left room for pedestrians to get by about their business. It was the gendarmes guarding the door, rather than the students, who prevented my meeting.

            From what I’ve heard the protests didn’t change much. Our regional deputy of the minister did come to town to talk with my students, but it seems the protests died across the country without much change. As a mass the protests didn’t have much effect probably because of their diffuse (and sometimes contrary) messages and the fact that many of the students have much more invested in getting back to class than their administrators do. However, I thought it showed great gumption and national level awareness from so many high school students to organize this series of protests, and evidences an interest in taking control of and reforming their education to suit their needs. As one of the protesting students said to me, Morocco’s youth have many great abilities and talents, and they’re just aching for the opportunity to use them.